Today is AMD's Financial Analyst Day at AMD's campus in Sunnyvale, CA. I'm not a financial analyst but there are some useful tidbits that are coming out of the presentations today. Obviously the focus at AMD these days is returning to profitability and with the planned spinoff of its manufacturing business, this should be possible.

AMD was quick to point out that it only has one competitor in the CPU space and one competitor in the GPU space. There are very few markets where there are only two competitors, which led to the following statement: "We ought to be able to make money, and we can make money".

Manufacturing is going to be an important topic today and AMD plainly laid out its manufacturing transitions for next year: AMD is going to move chipsets to 45nm in 2009, graphics will be pushed down to 40nm, and we'll see 32nm designs completed for production in 2010.

I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly but it appears to say that AMD's marketing strategy for North America is graphics-exclusive, with no real Phenom focus. The important disclosures thus far have been in the roadmaps however.

The Server Roadmap

Today AMD launched its Shanghai processor, the 45nm follow-on to last year's Barcelona. We also got a brief update on its server roadmap:

In the 2nd half of 2009 we'll see Istanbul, a 6-core 45nm product that will work in current sockets for Barcelona/Shanghai. In 2010 we'll see 8-core and 12-core solutions with up to four DDR3 memory channels and four Hyper Transport links.

Ah... targeting 640x352 is a huge difference from 1920x1080. I'm not positive on this, but I'm pretty sure encoding times scale linearly with resolution under H.264. So, based on that, 1080P encoding would require 9.20 times longer than 640x352 encoding. It may not be *exactly* nine times longer - depending on quality settings among other things - but for sure the higher resolution encode is more processor intensive. Reply

My experience with h264 encoding follows your theory, fairly linear increase in encode time.
It's worth noting that Nero AVC quality is quite average. It is to h264 what xing was to mp3 encoding. It gets the job done fast, but at what cost? Reply

I don't think they have the development budget for ANYTHING right now that's not going to make some real money. Even Intel SAYS they aren't making as much because ATOM is taking sales away from higher margin parts.
That's really not a market segment AMD can get into right now. Maybe if they make some money for a few quarters... But I'll believe all this when I see it.